The food scene in, around, and outside of Champaign-Urbana

Trader Joe’s Product Review #2

Just only one product to report today. It’s Trader Ming’s Pad Thai in a box.

Trader Ming's Pad Thai from Trader Joe's

Picked this up in my last Trader Joe’s run, I’d seen my boss having a box of it for lunch.

Contents of Trader Ming's Pad Thai from Trader Joe's

The box content was simple – noodle and sauce. Put noodle in box, then sauce, and nuke it for 2 minutes. Simple.

Trader Ming’s Pad Thai from Trader Joe’s

As you can see, it doesn’t look impressive. Given that it was only noodle and sauce, you won’t get the authentic experience here. My disappointment stemmed from the expectation that “anything shipped direct from Thailand” just has to be good. Well, it’s not.

You can’t find fault with the rice noodle because it’s just rice noodle. However the sauce is another issue. Pad Thai sauce is basically water, tamarind paste, fish sauce, and sugar. The taste is to combine salty, sweet, and sour together in a sauce. In Thailand Pad Thai cooks tend to soak their noodle in the sauce before making individual servings for customers.

I think this product could be made more authentic if the sauce was augmented to be like the original sauce. There’s no taste of tamarind or fish sauce, plus it’s missing the pan-seared flavor obviously not available to instant foods. Would I get it again? Most likely not and I don’t really recommend it to anyone else either.